Because I have a pulse and a brain and I’ve lived through things like the Iran-Contra affair and 9/11 and WMDs (*which should technically be WsMD, LingOL) and Covid, I’ve always assumed the government was lying to us about aliens, too.
I don’t have a corkboard covered in red string or anything. I just figured there’ve been too many sightings, too many military pilots describing identical flying widgets, too many grainy videos and parallel accounts and suspiciously emphatic denials for the official explanation to be, Oh, that football-stadium-sized crater with the glowing wreckage? Just another weather balloon. Bad year for aerostats.
If what I listened to this weekend is even ten percent true, I regret to inform my readers that I have wildly underestimated the U.S. government’s commitment to keeping secrets.
Last week, former Air Force intelligence officer and UFO whistleblower David Grusch sat down with Joe Rogan and spent two and a half hours explaining that the truth may not be merely that Uncle Sam has recovered intergalactic spacecraft and non-human bodies. That was the version I was prepared for. I was not prepared for an entire extraterrestrial ecosystem with gorilla-lizards and interspecies warfare.
For starters, you know the little green guy we all grew up believing was probably out there somewhere? Enormous bald head, giant black eyes, maybe 3 feet tall with freakishly long arms and nostril holes where a human nose might go? Sure, he may be one type of interplanetary being. But according to reports, assuming he represents alienkind is straight-up bigotry; the equivalent of saying “all cats are fluffy and white and have smushed-in faces.”
According to Grusch, space invaders range from “very human to clearly not human but humanoidish.” They are varied enough that the government has an actual taxonomy. There are tall gray aliens. Tiny gray android aliens. Beautiful, human-looking “Nordic” beings that have blue-white skin and look like Greek gods.
ROGAN: “Isn’t there, like, a mantis?”
GRUSCH: “I have heard—I’ll call it water-cooler talk… of some sort of insectoid.”
JENNA: “Water-cooler talk? No, sir. Madonna at the VMAs is water-cooler talk. The weird bruise on my thigh is water-cooler talk. Space grasshoppers require a PowerPoint and a press conference.”
Then there are the reptilians. We’re not talking about cute little geckos in spacesuits here. Grusch described one reported variety as more than seven feet tall with scaly, “gorilla-looking” skin. Oh, and apparently there are multiple reptilian subtypes—many of whom fly around in spacecraft “shaped like Tic Tacs,” because evidently even the ape-lizards require their own drop-down menu and signature vehicle.
I cannot believe I am typing any of this. Grusch couldn’t seem to believe he was saying it, either. Throughout the interview, he repeatedly acknowledged how completely insane the conversation sounded—which somehow made it more unnerving than if he’d shown up wearing a SCUBA suit and a tinfoil sombrero.
The weirdest part? We haven’t even reached peak weirdness.
Grusch says he’s seen video of military personnel at a relatively recent crash-recovery site involving a boomerang-shaped craft and as many as four dead non-human bodies. He claims American military personnel have been killed during encounters with non-human beings, which—call me crazy—feels like the sort of thing that maybe should have been worth a media mention.
And if you assumed the aliens were united in their quest to probe cows and colonize Cincinnati, apparently non-humans have issues of their own. Grusch says there have been “at least a dozen or two” crashes that resulted from alien infighting. (Rogan: “So they’re, like, duking it out up there?” Ostensibly, yes.) At one alleged crash site, investigators reportedly recovered several dead grays as well as [*checks notes*] an unspecified number of reptilian aliens who had survived the impact.
OMG, you might be thinking. And then what happened?
The reptilians were subsequently shot. By U.S. troops.
ROGAN: “So we killed them?”
GRUSCH: “Yeah.”
ROGAN: “We shot the reptilians?”
GRUSCH: “Yeah.”
ROGAN: “Jesus. Yeah, that seems like a bad idea.”
This was an actual conversation between two human men I was listening to on Spotify while I cleaned my bathroom.
[ALSO: *adds “because we killed the reptilians” to List of Reasons the Government Sucks*]
Grusch isn’t claiming he personally hobnobbed with seven-foot lizard men behind a hangar at Area 51. The information comes from classified records, photos and videos, and firsthand accounts of people who actually worked inside the secret programs. In other words, he wasn’t one of Charlie’s Angels out in the field; he was Charlie.
He’s also not merely some guy who watched Close Encounters one too many times. He spent 14 years as a U.S. intelligence officer, served at the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and worked on the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. At the height of his career, Grusch had access to the sort of classified intelligence most of us aren’t even allowed to know exists. He later testified about all of it under oath before Congress. Which is to say he has exactly the sort of résumé that complicates the whole “this guy’s just a kook” explanation.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, maintains that it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity or that either the U.S. government or private industry has ever possessed alien technology. So.
UFO whistleblower: “We recovered the craft. And the bodies. Some were alive. There are multiple species. The reptilians are seven feet tall. Also, they fight each other.”
Military eyewitnesses: “We’ve seen things flying around that appear to defy the known laws of physics.”
Former intelligence officials: “The government has secret crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs.”
Congress: “Perhaps we should look into this.”
The Pentagon: “We’ve investigated ourselves and are pleased to report that we do not have the thing we have allegedly been hiding from you. Can we interest you in a commemorative coin?”
Like I said, I’ve always pretty much assumed the government knew more about UFOs than it was telling us. What I did not consider was that “more” might encompass an alleged intergalactic menagerie, a hidden alien graveyard, actual survivors somewhere, and what sounds suspiciously like an extraterrestrial turf war happening over our heads.
And here I thought I was a model conspiracy theorist.
And now Donald Trump has ordered the government to start declassifying its UFO files. Grusch says getting the truly sensitive material out could take at least a year.
Which leaves one to wonder: What could “the truly sensitive material” possibly contain? Because if towering reptilian gorillas getting into aerial altercations with little gray Martians is information we’re nonchalantly discussing on Spotify now, I’d love to know what’s still considered too weird for Susan in accounting.
(Also, Grusch claims other non-human beings have been recovered alive, which raises another fairly obvious follow-up question: WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY? Who’s feeding them? Do they have roommates? Can they phone home if they want to?)
At one point, Grusch casually mentioned his friend Matt Sullivan—one of his sources inside the alleged UAP program—who “mysteriously died” two weeks before he was scheduled to testify before Congress about secret government UFO programs. Sullivan, a decorated Air Force intelligence officer who had worked at NASIC, the NSA, and the Air Force Intelligence Agency, was 39. His death was ruled an accidental overdose, although apparently not everyone was satisfied with that explanation: Rep. Eric Burlison found the circumstances concerning enough to ask federal authorities to investigate. Even in the context of humanoid deities and actual Sleestaks, that one deserves a hmmmmmmmmm.
And somehow even that isn’t the weirdest story in this mess. Eight days after Trump ordered the UAP declass, retired Air Force Major General Neil McCasland—an astronautical engineer who once ran the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a base long rumored to house bodies and debris linked to the Roswell crash—walked out of his Albuquerque home without his phone or his prescription glasses. He has never been seen again.
There is absolutely no evidence that these two events are connected, incidentally. I would simply like the universe to stop presenting me with sentences that require disclaimers like that.
Anyway, I look forward to the rest of the declassified files, assuming they’re released before the next alleged witness vanishes, the grid goes down, or the reptilians figure out how to use ChatGPT.
The more the government insists there are aliens, the less likely I believe their existence to be. I guess no one ever heard of “making shit up” by a government interested in maintaining control of their populace through fear?
If some agency in our government did not send that man to spread b******* on Joe rogan's show, I will eat my hat.